Of Bodies Changed

By Cliff James

When Jackie travels to the South Downs in search of her childhood home, she uncovers a sinister secret lurking in the family closet. Her estranged brother, Chris, is her last remaining relative, but he has been transformed into something unrecognisable by the ghosts of the past.
In her journey to discover the truth, Jackie enters a strange world of free-loving heathens, environmental warriors and sadistic priests, where dragons dwell beneath the streets of northern towns and demons prowl on the edge of Avebury’s stone circle.
A gothic tale of love, revenge and atonement, Of Bodies Changed is an odyssey through the ancient myths that echo the human experience.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jul 22, 2014
• ISBN: 9781291958676

Book preview

Of Bodies Changed

Of Bodies Changed

Cliff James

Of Bodies Changed

First Edition

Copyright © 2014 Cliff James

ISBN 978-1-291-95867-6

The author has asserted their moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

All Rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, copied, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the copyright holder, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this compilation are fictitious.

Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

www.cliffjames.net

Epigraph

The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged and numerous senses could perceive.

And particularly they studied the Genius of each city and country, placing it under its Mental Deity;

Till a System was formed, which some took advantage of, and enslav’d the vulgar by attempting to realise or abstract the Mental Deities from their objects – thus began Priesthood;

Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales.

And at length they pronounc’d that the Gods had order’d such things.

Thus men forgot that All Deities reside in the Human breast.

- William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Acknowledgements:

My special thanks are due to the first readers, Caroline Howlett and David Booth, for magic and realism; Daniel Cutmore, for competing against a formidable mistress; Ros Hunt and Gunaruci, for an essential education in equality and solidarity; Jacqueline Hodgson, for Celtic memories; Adam Clark, for the gentle gifts of time and space; Sigrid Fisher, for feistiness and other indispensible materials; Claire Burton and Judith Stone, for asking three times; Mel Rhind and Matt Hall, for choosing to fight; Neil Walden for shining so brilliantly; Colin Wolfe and Ayan Dasvarma, for inverting the upside-down world; Torsten Hojer, for giving a chance; Adam Baird, for countless rants of occasional genius; Janet Farrell, Baz Inquai, Jo Hickman and Jamie Beagent, for postage stamps, patronage and permanent fellowship; Holly Hero and Andy Dixon, for providing a safe space; Anne Irvine, for a fine pair of eagle eyes; and J, for the moon that never quite set.

I  Of Air

18th October 1999

I journeyed all night to grieve in the south after scattering my mother’s ashes over the North Sea.  Behind me, the husks of her memory surged in a storm that rent the land asunder.  I fled the shapes she made in the air. Now dust is all I remember.

My mother used to say that the north wind blows when the earth grieves for its lost daughter.  She said that the days become darker and the sky colder because Proserpine has been taken by the king of the underworld into his subterranean realm.  For half the year, the sky will weep and the world will wail its loss until the wheel turns, the seasons shift and Proserpine returns with the spring.

I do not know the stories of other people, nor the myths they tell their children.  I do not know what reasons they give for the turning of the wheel.  I only remember what I think I know: a simple tale told at bedtime, whispered in the flickering candlelight of an October storm.  A goddess-child taken to the underworld.  A world locked in winter for six months of the year.  My mother spoke quietly in her sing-song Greek inflections, smoothing out the long vowels and softening the consonants, until I slept and dreamed of Proserpine’s return.  In spite of the gale, I dreamed of the spring.

She told me that tale more than twenty years ago.

I came south this month as the north wind tore trees from the earth and tossed them in my path.  The rivers roared over stone bridges and flooded the streets of sleepy towns.  By dawn, I saw the devastated countryside for miles around.  The morning revealed an eerie wilderness, a world laid waste by the autumn storm.  The radio catalogued incoming reports of tragedies around the country, warned parents to keep their children locked safe inside, told motorists not to venture onto the roads.

‘Fuck you,’ I told the radio and fumbled to light a cigarette with one hand, holding the steering-wheel with my elbows.  I pushed an old, scratched CD into the player and silenced the news with sepia-coloured folk music from my mother’s country.  I had been driving since midnight; it was now seven.  I had not stopped since leaving Whitby.  My eyes still flickered with the dancing sparks of my mother’s ashes.  I felt through the rubble on the passenger seat, among the empty cans and ancient Diazepam and even older Lorazepam wrappers for something to soothe the storm.  All of the packets were empty.  I groped the lid off an unmarked container, most probably Benzodiazepine, and swallowed three dry tablets without a drink.  The car veered across two lanes, hammered by the gale.  I struggled to steer against the elements.

They say that the Earth Mother went in search of the underworld where her daughter had been taken.  She hunted for the gateway into Hades but was denied access.  Whether she overdosed on sedatives and drove through the greatest storm in living memory, I cannot say.  I did and like her was refused admittance.

Once upon a time, one evening in April, I remember my own mother driving a car, my brother and I huddled under a duvet in the back seat.  We stopped at a petrol station to fill up the tank.  She came back from the counter with past-sell-by-date sandwiches for our tea.  I remember the excitement, the feeling that the world’s wheel had turned again, that my mother was now steering.

‘Now, people, listen’ she announced.  At difficult times, she often spoke to us as her nation, as though she were a tribune addressing the commonwealth.  We, Chris and I, were her two citizens.  ‘We’re on a voyage, an adventure.  We’re off to explore the world.  The universe is laid out before us.  We can go anywhere and do anything.  Jackie, Chris – where shall we go?  You tell me the destination and there we will go.’

I sat up and looked out of the window.  A motorway sign blazed in the darkness.  I read the words as we passed.

‘What’s in The North?’  I asked.

‘Good girl, Jackie.  The North it is.  What about you, Chris?  Any preferences?  We can take a vote.  This is a democracy now, agapi mou.’

‘When’s Dad joining us?’ asked Chris.  He was examining the ham in his open sandwich.  He was only three years older than me, but I remember thinking at the time he sounded more cynical than his years.  There was a maturity in his voice, a scorn behind his words.  He would not be bought with talk of democracy, promises of citizenship.  This night-time quest did not thrill him as it did me.  He held my mother’s eye in the rear view mirror.  I turned away to look at the southern lands we were leaving behind, to cling onto the dissipating excitement of our great drive north.

All that happened a generation before I lost my family, before my mother’s death, before I scattered her ashes over the murderous sea.

I lit another cigarette and tuned the radio back on.  More news of accidents, more victims of the storm.  The hurricane had swept down the spine of the country, drawing me on its journey south.  I followed in its wake, never quite catching the wild eye of the storm.  By the time a bloodshot sun heaved over the plains of East Anglia, the hurricane had thrown itself into the English Channel.  The radio was still telling motorists to stay at home.

I became skilful at avoiding flying debris.  Trees had tumbled like dominoes over the landscape.  Swathes of the roadside forests had been levelled by the hurricane; upended trunks blocked the road.  I drove on grass verges and into the opposite lanes to circumvent branches, bins, abandoned vehicles.  The first evidence of life I passed were two ambulances at the Dartford Crossing screaming towards a fatality.

The night my mother took us north was very different.  The air that evening was quite still and the stars had come to watch over our escape.  The tense land held its breath for our great flight to freedom.  She drove swiftly, stealthily, under the cover of darkness.  She said we were following the Evening Star beyond the next horizon.  I asked her how far that was.

‘Can’t you see Venus?’ she said, gently teasing my excitement.  I looked out of the window and felt afraid.  The sky was immense.  The stars had been unloosened and now danced across the unruly universe.  When the car shuddered over potholes in the road, gravity evaporated.  At any moment, we too would drift up and away into the unshackled darkness.  Sinking back into my seat, I hid from the vast wilderness of sky.

‘Yes, of course I can see it.’ As soon as I had said it, I knew that such a lie carried bad luck.

She looked at the clock and said we were making good time; we could stop for a breather.  The car pulled into a wooded siding and we got out to stretch our legs.  The sudden silence of the engine was startling.  She took my hand and called over her shoulder for Chris to follow.  He kicked at stones and glared after us.  I saw his cold eyes shining in the headlights.

She led us through the trees and up a steep grassy slope.  It was dark, a darkness more pure than I can ever remember – and yet I felt safe, concealed.  I listened to my mother’s breathing beside me, felt my hand in her warm, secure grip.  We scrambled up the incline and over the edge until our faces were slapped by the wind.  The trees ended abruptly at the ridge of the hill.

‘That,’ she whispered quietly so her accent would not be carried in the soft breeze, ‘that down there, that was Balwick.  That was your father’s country.  The fields, the churches, the thatched cottages, the fences, the gates, the locks. That – all of that – was your father’s kingdom.  Say goodbye to Balwick, people.’  She swept her hand over the twinkling landscape, brushing aside the swarm of lights.  The declining line of the South Downs reached around the low-land towns like the arms of a jealous giant might cradle his treasure.  A slim rib of waning moon hung over the landscape.

‘The world is now before us,’ she said.  ‘We can go wherever we want.  You see those hills snaking off into the distance?  That is a great wall that has kept us divided from the world.  Those lights, those houses: that used to be our country, people; our prison.  Feel the wind.  See, even the air out here is free.’

She stood tall and surveyed the county, her face posed and defiant.  In my mind now, I see her looking as proud as Alexander the Great contemplating the Indus Valley for the final time before he turned his back on it forever.  The breeze lifted her hair and she was beautiful, an angel burning softly in the starlight.  I know that this is only my memory, a myth I have created to ease her parting, but that is how I choose to retell it.  I have power over nothing if not the past.

My mother pointed at Venus.  The planet hesitated above the smooth ridge of the Downs.

‘When that star is overhead we’ll stop driving and make our new home, wherever that will be.’

‘How far is that?’ I asked, electrified again by the late-night adventure.  ‘What will the people be like?  Will they speak the same language as us?  Will we be able to understand them?’

My mother laughed and knelt down beside me.  ‘Yes, agapi mou, they speak the same language as us.  We will live by the seaside and go down to the beach to collect shells every day.  In winter, it will snow so hard that we will build a snowcastle as high as these hills.  Higher.  And when the north wind blows, we’ll curl up in front of a fire and tell each other the very best stories.  We’ll invent new tales until that old grey wind grows weary of its wailing and falls asleep.’

‘But what about Dad?’ said Chris.  At that moment, I hated him for breaking the spell.  I wanted to kick his shins for being a traitor, for speaking in that new adult voice.  My mother stood up and searched for the keys in the pocket of her jeans.

‘The wind’s picking up.’  She turned abruptly towards the trees.  ‘We’d best make tracks.’

I took one last look at Venus winking over the Downs.  Chris came last, dragging his heels.  His face was turned back towards the lights of the low-land towns.  I could not understand why he seemed so hard, so determined to loiter.  It made me afraid.

We followed my mother’s voice down the slope and into the woods.  I no longer felt safe and concealed by the darkness, but hunted by the eyes of hidden beasts in the undergrowth.  Something was waiting to scream our names, to wake the sleeping birds and warn the giant that we were trespassing in his forest.  The trees would march us back to my father’s house.  Branches lifted and leaves dropped heavily around us.

‘You know why she doesn’t like the wind?’ Chris whispered conspiratorially close to my ear.  ‘It’s because she’s afraid.  She knows that the wind carries our scent on the air.  She knows that every wolf in the forest can smell us.  She knows they’re watching us from the darkness, waiting to pounce.’

‘She isn’t afraid,’ I said loudly to shame him.  ‘There are no wolves are there, mummy?  Chris says there are wolves.’

She did not look at me but told us to keep close.

I thought I had embarrassed Chris and exposed his tale.  Instead, he laughed at both of us.  I clung to my mother’s hand.  Looking back at his dark silhouette, I felt more afraid of him than of the approaching wolves in the undergrowth.

That was the last time I saw the South Downs, my father’s country.  Even now when I dream of it, there are wolves among the trees.

Coming back to this place in the wake of the hurricane, I saw those hills for the first time in more than twenty years.  Many of the trees had been pulled up by the storm.  I recognised the curves of the land, the way the road wound carefully over the arms of the Downs, a dangerous path over the muscles of a sleeping giant.  I remembered the place from a starlit scene, fantastically clothed with layer upon layer of memory.  Now, in the stark light of morning, the ridge seemed bald and humble, the fantasy stripped away with cold recognition.  The myth shed its skin.  I did not know what I would find lurking beneath.

I parked the car on the roadside and fought the wind for control of the door.  That old remembered grove had been combed flat against the earth and now only the hardiest trunks remained standing.  The wind forced me against the roots and between sharp, splintered branches.  It was easier to clamber on my hands and knees.  It hurt to open my eyes; it hurt to listen.  I scaled the steep bank, sometimes crawling beneath the shelter of an uprooted trunk, always on the watch for a pair of red eyes among the branches, a twitching black nose, a jagged grin.

As soon as I looked over the ridge, I was hit by the fury of the gale. The county lay stretched below, a patchwork quilt pulled flat and taut between the Downs.  Beneath the shelter of the ridge, I stole quick glimpses of my father’s country.  Those sprawling suburbs, lonely steeples and up-turned woods all conformed to familiar patterns, but they had been reduced in substance by the passing of years.  Balwick lay in the valley, pummelled by the winds and diminished by time.  The county had declined in my absence and now seemed exhausted, deprived of its threats and magnitude, beaten into submission.

I stayed for a minute or two, trying to match the landscape to the memory.  I could not see the tiled spire and white tip of the house where I grew up, my childhood home.  The house was an oast-house, a 17th century hop kiln where beer-makers had once turned dried hops into ale.  Sometime in the last half century, the Church had turned the oast-house into a vicarage and the alcohol was converted into blood.  My father moved in when he took charge of the parish, years before he was married.  He lived there alone long after my mother had run away with us to the north to the uncertain sanctuary of Whitby.  He spent his last days in that place, our prison, hoarding his old family wealth under his mattress, a goblin-king enthroned on a treasure trove.  I barely remembered my father at all.  I did not go to his funeral.

We used to tell stories about the haunted oast-house.  We used to say that the building had a dark, pagan mind of its own.  It hated its forced conversion to a sober religion.  It hated its Christian occupiers and their sterile creed.  It tried to harm us by moving furniture, twisting loose rope into nooses, breaking glass on the carpet.  Anything it could touch, it would.  My mother told us the story of the fork that flew across the kitchen, cutting her cheek and jamming so deeply into the wall that it had to stay there as a permanent reminder.  Chris said that his bedroom chair would walk over the carpet each night, lodging itself against the door handle and locking him inside.  I had sworn never to go back.

Family ghost stories.  Childhood fears.  I climbed back into my car and pulled the door against the wind.  The radio announced several deaths during the night, but assured me that the storm was abating.  I lit another cigarette and started the engine.

After our father died, Chris bought the oast-house back from the Church.  Reassuringly, he was no longer a Christian; far from it.  Surely now, I had thought when I heard the news, the building could rest in peace.  Surely now, the forks would lie still in the cutlery drawer.

I drove over the ridge of the Downs and entered the maelstrom of the weather side.  The car rocked from side to side, harried by storm-devils.  I tried to brake but the wind shoved the car harder and faster down the hillside.  I prayed – to what?  to the sky?  to the earth? – that no vehicles were coming up the other way, that no trees were lying in my way.  I lost control of my descent.  Through the window, I saw the oast-house steeple jolting over the landscape and wondered if that would be the last thing I should see.  I thought, vaguely, that this is how you get access to the underworld.

My cigarette fell on the passenger seat and I tried to smother it.  Among the prescription packets and empty cans, I stumbled upon the container of unknown tablets.  I took the last two pills and flung the bottle over my shoulder.  If this is going to be it, I thought, I might as well go out in style: a car crash and a cocktail of unknown barbiturates.  Monroe and Diana in one.  I tugged the sleeves of my cardigan over my knuckles.  It was the one my mother knitted me one blustery February when the power lines were down.  I pressed its comforting roughness between my fingers and wished I had been wearing my black graduation dress instead.  It was the only smart outfit I had ever owned.  That way, when they lifted my body from the wreckage, the men – handsome firemen, all of them, of course – would want to kiss me and the women of Sussex would weep into their black mourning shawls.  No one in this part of the world would weep for a premature spinster in a frumpy woollen cardigan.

And then I laughed.  As if a dress could make men swoon and women weep.  I laughed at the leaping car, the furious wind, at the madness of my night-time journey.  I laughed at my mother’s death, her ashes dancing over the North Sea, the seagulls that swooped in for the pieces.  And then I laughed tears over the steering wheel as an oncoming car veered out of my path and bounded onto the grass verge.  I swerved into a spin and watched the sky come tumbling down, the dark land dissolving in upturned clouds.

They say that the Earth Mother went mad with grief and wandered the universe in search of her lost daughter.  They say she was refused entry to the underworld until she reached that moment of awakening, that precise point of despair when she herself was ready to die.  Then, they say, and only then, was Proserpine released from Hades and spring returned with her mother’s unbounded delight.  That, at any rate, was my mother’s version of events.

She became silent and concentrated on the cardigan she was knitting.  The February gales moaned outside the window, like the ghosts of sailors returned from watery graves.  I turned my back on the glass, afraid of their pale, bloated faces.  My mother rocked in the lamplight.  It was an image she cultivated: the old Greek widow of the sea, knitting clothes for her unborn grandchildren in a rocking chair.  But she was neither old, nor likely to ever have any grandchildren.

‘When will the power come back?’  I hugged my knees and swayed to the rhythm of her creaking chair.  I pretended to be her shadow.

‘Probably in the morning.  We won’t have it tonight, not with this weather.’

‘Where will Chris be now?’ I stole a peek at the window.

She stopped knitting to look at her wristwatch.  I was glad when she resumed, filling the room with the click-click-click of her reassuring needles.  I believed in her magic, her power to keep the dead sailors of the storm outside our house.  Her knitting spell was my favourite.

‘It’s nearly nine.  He’ll be in London now, changing trains.’

‘Will he ring us when he gets there?’

She frowned to count the stitches on her needle.  She answered quietly, ‘No, agapi mou.  He won’t.’

Hecate, the cat, padded into the room and circled the coffee table, mewing querulously.  I gathered her into my arms and held her face against mine.

‘Will he ever come back?’

A sudden thump shook the bookshelves on the wall that faced the sea.  I screamed and the cat bolted out of my grasp.  My mother stood up and glared fiercely around the room.

‘It’s just the shed door knocking in the wind.’  She smiled and rubbed her tired eyes.  ‘Go outside and close it for me, would you, darling?  I’ll make some hot chocolate.’

I looked at the bleached faces of the ghost sailors.  Their fish-mouths gasped against the window.

‘Go, Jackie.  Take this for good luck.’ She handed me a knitting needle.  I looked up and saw tears in her eyes.

* * *

The car horn droned monotonously.  It seemed to be somehow responsible for the aching in my head.  I felt a tight pain around my stomach, squeezing the air from my lungs.  I was upside down, curled in a foetal position and pressed hard against the inside of the car roof.

I heard a man’s voice close by, speaking gently with a soft accent.  He asked if I could hear him, if I could move my hand, if I could open my eyes.  I thought of the dead sailors at the window, their eyeless sockets and skinless fingers pressing against the glass.  I clenched my eyes in dread, refusing to look at the ghoul, and answered yes to all his questions.

I smelt not seawater but aftershave as he reached across to unclip the seatbelt.  He supported my neck with one arm and gently lowered my shoulders to the roof.  The pain around my stomach eased as the belt gave way.  With the help of his guiding hands, I crawled out through the window into the gale.

‘Do you hurt anywhere?’ I recognised his accent as Irish.  When I opened my eyes, I saw a fully fleshed man in his mid-thirties anxiously looking me up and down.  He stared at my temple, at the aching point where the blood trickled freely. 

‘I think we need to get you to a doctor, miss,’ he said.  I fingered the wound he was frowning at.

‘Really, it’s nothing.’  I looked at my bloodied hand and tried to stand up.  ‘It’s just a cut.  I’m fine to drive, really I am.’

I leaned against the car to steady myself, barely comprehending that the vehicle lay upturned in a field several metres from the road.

The man put his hand to my elbow and said something about concussion.  I thought of my smart graduation dress, of Sussex women weeping and handsome firemen sighing.  I laughed but the pain cut me short.  It’s just shock, I thought.  It makes you say and do ridiculous things, like laugh when you could have died.

He walked me to his own car that was parked on the grass verge where he had swerved, and handed me a handkerchief.

‘You’re lucky not to have killed yourself,’ he said sternly.  ‘And me with you.  You’d best come home with me.  We’ll call you a doctor from there.’

‘Your accent.  You’re not from Sussex, are you?’  I pressed the handkerchief against my head.  ‘You’re not a fireman by any chance?’

He stared blankly, unsmiling.  Of course he wouldn’t smile.  How could he smile at the fool who almost killed him, who might keel over at any moment with some internal haemorrhage?  He mentioned concussion again, but I simply stared back at him.  Looking at him was like looking at the uncomprehending face of some animal, I thought; the blank pupils of a goat or a sheep perhaps.  Or something that had wandered from the menagerie of dreams: a fabulous hybrid, half-human half-ibex.  He returned my gaze but there was no connection.  The moment, whatever it was, passed quickly enough and he held the passenger door of his car open for me to get inside.

‘Are you married?’ I asked, bending carefully and climbing in.

‘No.  I live with Jake.  And he’ll be wondering where I’ve been all this time, that’s for sure.’

‘Who’s Jake?’

‘My partner, my significant other, if you will,’ he answered shortly and climbed into the driver’s seat without looking at me.

He reversed down the verge and turned towards Balwick.  I could see the white tip of the oast-house poised on the edge of the cluttered houses, its steeple pointed at the fast-moving sky.  Turning the wheel briskly, my rescuer dislodged a photograph from the dashboard.  I caught it as it fell on his knee.  It was a photo of him, looking at least a decade younger, and his boyfriend, I assumed.  They were standing outside what I recognised as St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, my Irish hero resting a proprietorial hand over his lover’s shoulder. 

‘Is that your Jake?  He’s very good-looking.  Quite a catch.  What’s that white streak in his hair?’

‘It’s a white streak in his hair.’

‘How strange.  Is it natural?  He doesn’t look that old.’

‘Yes, of course it’s natural.’  His tone told me not to ask any more.  I glanced at his face and thought him very handsome, though uptight and tired.  Grey hair sprouted prematurely behind his ears and dark stubble peppered his pronounced chin.  From the side, he looked like a goat more than ever.

‘I’m Jackie,’ I said, and when there was no response, ‘do you have a name?’

‘Martin.  Why, what’s got into you?  What’s so funny?’

‘I couldn’t say,’ I said, laughing again.  ‘Concussion, most probably.  And all those mysterious pills, I shouldn’t wonder.  I actually can’t help it.’

Martin sighed.  ‘So, you’ve been taking drugs?’

Clearly a bad sign, this inappropriate mirth.  I felt immature in his presence, incompetent and not at all myself.  I knew what he thought of me as clearly as if he had said it aloud.  I was an irresponsible driver who ventured into hurricanes despite the dire warnings, probably unbalanced because I laughed without cause, and partial to unmarked pills to top it off.  It was written in his tight lips.  It was evident when he rolled his dull, animal eyes.  I was metamorphosing into the cluster of things he imagined me.  Realising this, I found him instantly unattractive.

‘I asked you a question,’ he said, staring at the road ahead.

‘Only prescription.  Why, does it worry you, having a mad woman in your car?’

‘No, my dear, I’m just wondering whether I’ve made a mistake, not leaving you in that ditch.’

Fuck you, I thought, and turned to the familiar landscape.  Trees stretched across garden fences, tiles were scattered over the road.  We passed a house where the rafters had fallen in, another where a huge bough crushed the front porch.  I watched the steeple of the old vicarage grow closer.

‘So, is everyone in this town gay?’ I asked, changing tack.

‘Why?  Who else do you know?’  Now there was a nervousness in his voice, an unease that had not been there before.  It made me feel more relaxed.

‘My brother, Chris.  He lives at the old oast-house, the one that used to be a vicarage.  He’s gay too.  Chris Mavrocordatos?  You might know him?’

Martin slowed the car and turned to look at me.  He frowned and pursed his lips unpleasantly.  Could it be spite?  Had he recognised something in me, some resemblance to my brother?  Accelerating again, he turned to the road.

‘No, I don’t know him.  But I know of him.  I’ll drop you off there – at that place – instead.’

There was an undisguised resentment in his voice now.  He was not simply unfriendly, but resolutely hostile. His goat-like eyes remained on the road.  He pushed harder on the accelerator.

‘You don’t like Chris.’  I stated this as a fact.

He did not answer but clicked his tongue in irritation.

‘Are you scared of him?’ I asked mischievously and smiled at his discomfort.  For whatever reason, he hated Chris and, by association, that loathing extended to me.  As he turned down the old familiar lane towards the house, he frowned.

‘Does your man – Jake, is it? – does he know Chris?’

The car finally pulled up beside the great iron gates of the oast-house.

‘We’re here,’ he said firmly and I recognised something like fear in his voice.  There were beads of sweat on his forehead.  He refused to look at me.

‘You really are afraid,’ I said and looked up at the old house.  The spire reared against the eddy of running clouds.  From the safety of the car, I heard the weathervane creaking in the wind.  I remembered that sound from my childhood.  Chris used to creep into my bed at night and say it was a banshee, the Old Woman of the Downs, climbing onto the roof to steal away a soul.  He said he had seen her face once, shrieking through the window as she swung from the gutters.  The gutters now lay splintered on the lawn.

‘This is where you get out, miss,’ said Martin.  ‘Get out of the car, now.  Please.  Now.’

I pushed the door against the wind and climbed out.  Leaves and litter gathered around my ankles, seeming to recognise me.

‘Wait a minute,’ he called.  ‘I’m sorry, if you don’t mind, my handkerchief please.’

I looked at the bloody cloth in my hand and wondered if he could really be so petty as to demand it back.  Evidently he could.  Before I knew what to say, he reached across the empty seat, grabbed it and then closed the door.  He drove away without a backward glance.

I remembered those iron gates.  They were intricately designed, so finely constructed that a child could barely fit her hand through the tight spirals.  My father kept the only set of keys to that padlock in his cassock at all times, and would draw the chain between the bars before setting off on his parish rounds.  As a girl, I would stand at the gates like a statue, as still as Midas’s golden daughter, watching his black cassock disappear down the wooded lane.  When his footfalls had faded beyond earshot, I became flesh and bone again and tried different needles in the lock.  My mother gave me a new needle to try each day and mounted a watch from her bedroom window, scouring the lane for a sign of the priest’s return.

One day, one clear morning in April, she gave me a knitting needle, the last in her box.  It was a long, thin, metal needle, cold against the skin, powerful as a sword in my little hand.  I pressed it secretly against my belly until it grew warm under my blouse.  I watched at the gates as my father’s bald head disappeared down the lane. I counted his footsteps into silence.  My mother nodded the all-clear from her window and I penetrated the keyhole with the stick.  It clicked loudly, so loudly I thought the whole town had heard.  I held it with trembling fingers, waiting for the gates to scream and the Old Woman of the Downs to wail her banshee cry.  But the weathervane remained still and I stood in the spring sunshine of my mother’s smile.  That evening, she drove us out beyond the Downs, having locked the padlock firmly behind us.

Now, as then, the gates were locked, the chain pulled tightly between the railings.  I rattled the bars but they refused to yield.  Through the iron palisade, I watched yellow leaves spiral-dance over the weed-ridden drive.  The great oaks in the neighbouring cottage had been stripped of leaves by the force of last night’s storm.  Barren and without colour, the grounds of the oast-house reminded me of the Selfish Giant’s garden.

The few windows of the house were barred and shuttered, giving it the appearance of a closed face, a dead expression.  Paint peeled from the wooden door and window frames.  It was rotting with neglect.  The building lay upon the tired earth, lonelier than the carcass of a once-powerful dinosaur, blind and decrepit with age.  It heaved in the gale, the wind seething through the corridors like a tide through a shipwreck.  The tiles lifted with a sigh.

I called through the bars, but my words were swept into fragments by the wind.  Not a shutter lifted on the house, though I felt the unmistakable discomfort of being watched.

‘Hello?  Chris?  Is anybody home?’  My voice echoed harmlessly off the walls.  Only the circling leaves on the lawn whispered a response.  I felt snubbed, as though I had hailed a stranger I mistook for a friend.  Still, my skin prickled at the sense of being watched.  For some reason, I felt myself blushing.

Walking beside the immense stone wall, I circled the house westwards towards the jangle of wind-chimes from the neighbouring cottage.  It was on the border of the two gardens that I first saw the boy.

He was perched, gargoyle-like, on the cornerstone of the wall.  Sticking out his chin, he scowled in a way that might have been aggressive in an older teenager, but on him was simply precocious.  In his hand, he flicked a cigarette lighter unsuccessfully in the wind.  I suspected that this was meant as a threat.

Approaching him, I saw the hostility in those eyes, the menace in that sneer.  His cheeks were not, as I had first thought, smeared with dirt, but camouflaged with streaks of boot polish.  Lowering his face, his fierce blue eyes still holding me, he spat in my direction.  The wind caught the spittle and trailed it back down his chin.

‘What you looking at, shit-face?’ he said, smudging the black polish and saliva with his sleeve.

‘A very ferocious gargoyle, I think.  Or a goblin that hasn’t learned how to spit properly.  What’s your name?’

‘Shit-face,’ he repeated, and turned away to gaze at something more fascinating on the distant horizon.

‘Well, Shit Face, it’s nice to meet you.  Do you live there?’  I pointed over his shoulder at the cottage next door to the oast-house.  He kicked his heels against the stonework and began, tunelessly, to whistle.

‘Are you parents at home, Shit Face?’ I looked over the fence at the cottage garden.  Overgrown thyme and rosemary bushes rocked in the wind, half-revealing stone statues of assorted satyrs and centaurs.  An ancient elder tree bowed over the path, dangling wood-chimes from every branch.  More wind-chimes and shapes woven from willow branches swung from the porch and the windows around the cottage.  The house and garden were alive, animated by dissonant currents.

I raised a hand to my temple, now pierced with renewed pain, and felt the wound moisten.  The garden rippled unsteadily, shifting as the wind whirled the shrubs and bells.  I leaned against the wall as the earth shifted and the grass heaved beneath my feet.

The boy leaped to the ground in one lightning movement and touched my arm.

‘You feeling alright?’ he asked in a kinder voice.  I tried to focus on his changed face.  His dark eyes waxed full as he saw the blood running down my cheek.  The ferocious gargoyle on the wall had been transfigured into something brighter, more innocent, by his fall to the earth.

He pressed the sleeve of his sweater against my brow and wiped away the blood.  I closed my eyes and felt the world turn sideways, the soil surge upwards and strike the side of my face.  In the darkness, I tasted the bitter earth on my lips, heard the rustle of lice and beetles among the roots.  Here, in the land below consciousness, among the leaves and secret stones, I was sheltered from the wind that carved the slopes and curves of my body.  Like the giant of the South Downs, I arched my arms around my head and buried my face in dust.

A long way away, like a voice lost on the hills, I heard the cry of a child calling for his mother.  It was Proserpine, I thought, ranging among the worm-hole labyrinths in search of the grieving Earth Mother.  It will be a long season and a sad path through the elements before she gets there, I knew.  But for now, that lonely cry echoed like a lullaby through the caverns of chalk and rocked the Downs to sleep.

II  Of Fire

27th October 1999

Catriona Holt is a beautiful woman.  From the dark juices of her garden herbs she conjures healing potions and scented compresses, love perfumes that make the heart beat faster and pungent, rowan-berry curses mixed with mandrake root of which she speaks little but smiles, sidelong and mysterious. 

Catriona is a big woman.  Not fat, but awesome in the true sense of the word.  When she laughs, the air cackles around her; when she growls, the furniture cowers.  You feel her immense presence before she appears.  Full as the fruitful autumn, she arrives in swirling chiaroscuro dresses and carries a sweet sense of the equinox in her rippling wake.

Sitting beside my bed, she stirred her magic fingers in a wooden bowl and whispered spells.  Her dark-red lips stretched into a smile when she saw me reach from beneath the blankets and rub my eyes.  She placed the bowl on a bedside table and poured tea into a mug.

Touching the sun brooch that was pinned between her breasts, she told her son to put some parsnip soup on the wood-burning stove.  Somewhere in the house, above the jangle of wind-chimes and the murmuring radio, I heard the boy’s answering call.  Catriona passed the mug into my hand and held her warm fingers over mine.

‘What is it today?’ I asked.  ‘Dragon-wing tea?  Frog-skin coffee?  Something hallucinogenic and highly illegal, maybe?’

Catriona smiled and shrugged her shoulders with exaggerated modesty.  ‘Just a little something from the garden.  How are you feeling this afternoon?’

‘Is it the afternoon already?’  I leaned across the bed to part the curtains.  Outside, the dark clouds lumbered towards the Downs.  Catriona’s herb garden was overshadowed by the imposing walls of the oast-house next door.  ‘What time is it?’ 

‘It’s nearly five, darling.  You’ve been dreaming.  Your eyelids have been dancing like fairy wings.  I was beginning to wonder what dream could possibly tempt you away from me for so very long.’

‘Is it so late already?  Have I been asleep